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Barack Obama's policy speech in Chicago turns personal

By Jackie Calmes New York Times News Service

Posted:
02/15/2013 11:53:07 PM MST

Updated:
02/15/2013 11:53:59 PM MST

CHICAGO -- President Barack Obama came back home on Friday for a policy speech that inevitably turned personal: He spoke of teaching law nearby, meeting his wife, Michelle, raising their daughters less than a mile away and then, most recently, watching the first lady return for the funeral of a vivacious teenager gunned down in a park.

Less than two minutes into his remarks at the mostly African-American Hyde Park Academy high school, Obama paid tribute to 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, a girl who had been just a bit older than his daughter Malia, but who now represents Obama's private connection to the gun violence that he has begun to address in his second term.

Pendleton had attended a nearby high school until she was caught in what the police say was gang gunfire just days after she had marched in the president's second inaugural parade. In the audience here were her parents, Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton and Nathaniel Pendleton Sr., the latest involuntary activists for gun safety. On Tuesday they sat with Michelle Obama in the House gallery for Obama's State of the Union address.

"Unfortunately, what happened to Hadiya is not unique," Obama said. "It's not unique to Chicago. It's not unique to this country. Too many of our children are being taken away from us."

He spoke of Newtown, Conn., where 26 first-graders and their guardians were massacred two months ago.

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But as profoundly tragic as their murder was, he said, "last year there were 443 murders with a firearm on the streets of this city, and 65 of those victims were 18 and under. So that's the equivalent of a Newtown every four months. And that's precisely why the overwhelming majority of Americans are asking for some common-sense proposals to make it harder for criminals to get their hands on a gun."

Obama's visit followed trips to North Carolina and Georgia to promote anti-poverty proposals -- among them initiatives to spur manufacturing innovation centers, provide incentives to cities and states to make pre-school available to all 4-year-olds and raise the federal minimum wage.

Here he offered new details about an initiative to select 20 communities nationwide as laboratories for better coordinated federal, local, nonprofit and private-sector investments to revitalize long-distressed areas. The communities would be selected over the next several years, administration officials said, from urban and rural applicants that show persistent woes like high joblessness and crime rates, low rates of high school graduation and college attendance and health concerns among residents.

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